Life Support

Life support

Keeping a colony breathing on a world that has no air of its own.

The short version: an oxygen generator turns power into oxygen gas, the colony burns it every cycle, and running out decays morale and nothing else. It never kills a colonist. On a breathable dimension the whole system is inert — the machinery still builds and still runs, it simply has nothing to hold back.

The oxygen generator

nerocolonies:oxygen_generator is an electrolyser: it spends grid power and fills a 16,000 mB tank with oxygen at 4 mB per tick, before upgrade modules.

Property	Value
Energy buffer	50,000
Maximum energy transfer	1,000 per tick
Gas tank	16,000 mB
Base output	4 mB per tick
Energy draw while running	oxygenGeneratorEnergyPerTick (default 40 per tick)
Upgrade slots	2

SPEED modules raise throughput; EFFICIENCY modules reduce the energy each tick costs. A generator with a full tank, or with too little energy to pay for a tick, simply stops until there is room or power again.

Its comparator output tracks the stored oxygen fraction, so redstone can react to a tank running down.

Sides

Power comes in on every face and never leaves. Upgrade modules come in through the item channel, so a pipe can restock them. Gas is set to input and output on every face by default: a colony that already has an oxygen supply — a tank from a planet mod, a gas pipe network — should be able to feed this tank rather than being made to duplicate it.

Life support's own draw is deliberately separate from the side configuration. Colony upkeep must not be blocked by somebody having set every face's gas mode to disabled: the side config governs what leaves through the walls, not what the colony consumes internally.

Core's gas system

The tank is Neroland Core's gas buffer — identifier-keyed, measured in millibuckets — and the gas it produces is nerospace:oxygen.

That id is a shared value, not a shared type. Using a planet mod's own gas class would put that mod's types on this mod's compile classpath and turn a soft dependency into a hard one. Because the tank speaks Core's gas capability instead, any Core-aware gas system can fill or drain it with no NeroColonies-specific API at all.

How the colony finds its generators

Each running generator files its own position with its colony's life support on a slow cadence (every 40 ticks), and re-resolves which claim it stands in every 200 ticks. The colony tick then drains from the filed generators.

The alternative — having the colony search its claim for generators — would be a block scan on a hot path. A generator that stops running (no power, broken, chunk unloaded) simply stops refreshing and its registration expires after 200 ticks. Nothing about this registry is persisted, and nothing in it is player-shaped.

A generator whose chunk is merely unloaded is skipped rather than dropped: an absent chunk is not evidence of anything.

The demand

Per colony cycle:

oxygen required (mB) = oxygenMbPerColonistPerCycle x population x research oxygen multiplier

oxygenMbPerColonistPerCycle defaults to 20. Every unlocked oxygen_efficiency research effect compounds into the multiplier, which is floored at 0.1 — no amount of research makes life support free. Efficiency modules on a generator apply at the generator, to its energy cost, not here.

A colony with no population, or a server that has set the figure to 0, needs nothing.

The state machine

  OK  --(oxygen shortfall)-->  DEGRADED  --(grace expires)-->  FAILED
   ^                              |                              |
   +---------(oxygen restored)----+------------------------------+

• OK — demand was met this cycle (or there was none).
• DEGRADED — the colony is short and coasting on reserves. This state lasts lifeSupportGraceTicks (default 1200 ticks — one minute) of accumulated shortfall. The grace window exists so that a momentary power cut is not a catastrophe.
• FAILED — the grace ran out.

Recovery is immediate on the first cycle oxygen is available again, from either state. A colony that has been rescued should feel rescued.

Grace is session state: it is not written to the world save, so a reloaded colony starts from a clean grace window and reassesses from what it finds.

What FAILED actually does

It decays morale. That is all.

Failed life support contributes zero to the morale life-support term (against 1.0 for OK and 0.5 for DEGRADED), which drags the morale target down by up to moraleWeightLifeSupport points — 30 by default. Morale then slides toward that target at the usual rate, and if it falls below moraleWorkStopThreshold the colony's jobs stop and its colonists idle. Population growth is also gated on life support holding, so a failed colony stops growing.

No colonist is ever killed, harmed or removed by life-support failure. Nothing is destroyed and nothing is lost. The failure curve runs life support loss → morale decay → work stop → idle and stops there, so a colony that has gone wrong is still a colony you can walk back into and fix.

A crossing in either direction is published on Core's threshold event bus (channel nerocolonies:oxygen, scoped to the colony id and never to a person), so other mods — quest mods, alert systems — can react. Switch it off with thresholdEventsEnabled.

Which dimensions need life support

Two signals, in strict priority order.

1. A planet mod's own answer. When Nerospace is installed, its airless flag for the dimension is authoritative. NeroColonies reads it through a single reflective adapter, resolved once at startup: Nerospace is a soft dependency, is not on the compile classpath and is not required by any manifest.
2. Core's space dimension tag, as an advisory hint. With Nerospace absent, a dimension carrying the shared Neroland space tag is treated as airless. Another mod's planet dimension may well carry that tag, and honouring it costs nothing and makes NeroColonies work with a planet mod it has never heard of.

The hint never overrides the adapter: with Nerospace installed, a dimension it says is breathable is breathable, tag or no tag. There is a single authority for the answer whenever there is one.

With neither

Every dimension is breathable. Life support is never in trouble, whatever the machinery says, and the oxygen generator is buildable, runnable and simply unnecessary — an Earth-only game can still plumb one in for the day a planet mod arrives.

That fallback is deliberately not "assume airless". A mod that made vanilla Minecraft unbreathable because a different mod was not installed would be indefensible.

What is deliberately not consulted

Per-block breathability — a planet mod's oxygen-field system — is not used anywhere in NeroColonies. Colonist life support is our own colony-level system precisely because a planet mod's oxygen path is written for players and has no NPC route at all. There was never an implementation to reuse, so this is not duplication.

Research that helps

Node	Effect
nerocolonies:life_support/recyclers	oxygen burn x 0.85
nerocolonies:life_support/hydroponics	oxygen burn x 0.9, plus the hydroponics job and a morale bonus

Multipliers compound, floored at 0.1 of the base burn. See Jobs & research.

See also

• Colony basics — morale, population and the colony cycle
• Jobs & research — unlocking the efficiency nodes
• Config — oxygenMbPerColonistPerCycle, oxygenGeneratorEnergyPerTick, lifeSupportGraceTicks, moraleWeightLifeSupport